Quotes from Robert Christgau

I found dozens of albums I loved every year of the early 70s and more in the late 70s and more still in the decades since, partly because I knew more about music by then and partly because there were more to choose from.

When I grew up, there was a monoculture. Everybody listened to the same music on the radio. I miss monoculture. I think it's good for people to have a shared experience.

I am one of the barbarians - I love rock and roll.

If you wanna write non-fiction you have to be interested in the world.

I review albums - really positive reviews - I know I'll never hear again, 'cause I'm just not going to have the time.

I don't know any celebrities. I know a lot of people that most people have never heard of.

I think I've had a certain amount of success at making phrases. I'm a good writer. But obviously, I'm incredibly flattered and pleased when people remember things that I say.

But I don't write a full capsule review of anything I haven't heard five times. It's usually closer to ten.

The idea with a collection is sort of to begin with a kind of bang.

One way I judge music is whether it compels me to listen to it.

I am interested in the highbrow/lowbrow synthesis. My sensibility, I am proud to say, is middlebrow.

You know, criticism began as the province of amateurs, of wealthy men who liked the arts.

The most important single fact about pop music in the Nineties, is the number of hours made commercially available increased by an estimated factor of ten.

Once people write criticism about something - and even in 1967 I was far from alone - they're assuming it's art, and art is supposed to last.

If you're intimate with a mind as powerful as that of Ellen Willis, it takes you a long time to separate yourself from her ideas. She had an extremely powerful mind.

All lives are interesting – how interesting depends on the telling

One concept the non-old have trouble getting their minds around is the difference between taste and judgment. It's fine not to like almost anything, except maybe Al Green. That's taste, yours to do with as you please, critical deployment included. By comparison, judgment requires serious psychological calisthenics. But the fact that objectivity only comes naturally in math doesn't mean it can't be approximated in art.

To the eternal "Opinions are like assholes—everybody's got one," I just say, "Yeah, but not everybody's got ten thousand of them." It distresses me that the wit of this riposte so often fails to impress the asshole I'm talking to.

One of the many foolish things about the fools who compare writing about music to dancing about architecture is that dancing usually is about architecture. When bodies move in relation to a designed space, be it stage or ballroom or living room or gymnasium or agora or Congo Square, they comment on that space

Punk nostalgia, on the other hand, is a grotesque oxymoron. What can it mean to pine for a time when you were young and nihilistic? To look back twenty years to when you believed there was no future?

In the worst of times music is a promise that times are meant to be better. Ultimately, its most important political purpose is to keep us human under fire.

I don't think that most of my peers in rock criticism are from the West Coast. I think most of them are from the East Coast.

In fact, many rock critics look askance at explicitly political lyrics, which I think is pretty stupid, without denying that some political lyrics are also pretty stupid.

One of the many things I hate about Donald Trump is that he embodies a kind of very popular popular culture that, as near as I'm able to perceive and stomach, is of no quality whatsoever.